


'cause (in a sky full of stars) i think i saw you

by 24bookworm68



Series: three for tallahassee [1]
Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic Fluff, Extended Metaphors, F/F, F/M, I can't believe I actually wrote this, Implied Sexual Content, Multi, Poetry, Polyamory, Polyamory F/F/M, Polyamory Negotiations, Runaway Swan Thief Week, Underage Drinking, i'm not warning for underage bc it is really only implied but, my au is a kinder world than canon, this is a mess, what is it with me and star metaphors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-16
Updated: 2015-12-16
Packaged: 2018-05-07 00:06:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5435813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/24bookworm68/pseuds/24bookworm68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"'cause you're a sky, you're a sky full of stars, such a heavenly view, you're such a heavenly view" -a sky full of stars, Coldplay</p><p>Ignoring the world in favor of playing house, Lily Emma and Neal find time to discuss their situation in between kisses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	'cause (in a sky full of stars) i think i saw you

**Author's Note:**

> runaway swan thief week, prompt: stars. Lily is a human disaster who makes a mean waffle and sometimes excels at romantic gestures.
> 
> hope everybody had a happy hanukkah, i stayed up until five in the morning writing this.

They’ve broken into a vacation home somewhere around San Bernardino when Lily starts to have a very good feeling about this.

Well, she’s had good feelings - _very_  good feelings, wink wink nudge nudge, they have fun - about having Neal around for a while, always good to have an extra set of sticky fingers, another clever head to put to the plan, and he makes Emma laugh which is good because Emma’s laugh is Lily’s favorite sound and has been for years, but it doesn’t really settle until the vacation home.

She falls asleep in the middle, the first night, without blankets because California’s muggy even in February, and wakes up smushed between them, Emma’s hair clinging to her sweaty skin and Neal wrapped around her arm, stupid octopus-armed boyfriend -

\- well. Well, not officially. Whatever.

Lily is not getting back to sleep, even though it’s too early for even Emma to be up, _disgusting_ , so she shimmies off the foot of the bed without waking up either of her lovers, miraculously, turns for a second to look at them, scooting closer together, curled together like quotation marks. She grins, she’s always smiling nowadays, it’s hard to believe the days between losing Emma for the first time and finding her for the second existed.

If they’re playing house anyway, Lily might as well make breakfast. Neither of _them_  can cook worth a damn and the vacation home has a motherfucking _waffle iron_. Lily has missed homemade waffles. She turns the radio on low and sings along to the top forty and feels the worst kind of domestic and doesn’t care and doesn’t care and doesn’t _care_  because she’s _happy_. They might not have much but it’s so nice to be _seen_  that it takes her breath away sometimes, so nice to be on the receiving end of looks that say she _matters_. She never got that with her parents, she gets it all the time with her… well, whatever, her people, that’s as good a word as anything, Emma is her person and Neal is her person and she is their shared person and they are each others’ person and it’s all a big beautiful clusterfuck that she doesn’t know what to do with and doesn’t care to figure out, analyzing it might take away some of the magic and she doesn’t want that.

Emma shuffles out into the main area sniffing with a sleepy smile on her face. “Breakfast?” she asks, with a tone of wonder.

“You bet, babe,” Lily chirps back, and laughs at the look on her girlfriend’s ( _that one_  is _official_ ) face. Emma, who is getting better at casual affection, wraps her arms around Lily from behind, humming happily into her shoulder. Lily, who is a human disaster, tries very desperately to convince herself not to ruin breakfast by getting involved in other things. Emma has a habit of compromising her judgment, so Lily bats at her face until she laughs and moves away to start coffee up.

Predictably, between the sweet smells of coffee and waffles, Neal wakes up pretty fast. Lily hears the _thud_  of him rolling out of bed and then a snicker from her other side. She loves them both so much. Neal creeps out of the bedroom with his eyes more closed than open, making a beeline for the coffee with only a short pit stop to kiss both of the girls on the sides of their heads.

Lily tells herself she’s glad _one_  of them is keeping his hands off her while she makes breakfast.

Emma tries to steal a waffle off the plate before she’s made them all and gets her hand smacked with a fork because Lily is doing this _right_ , dammit, and the effort is worth it because both of her people make frankly indecent noises when they dig in, so _t_ _here_. She’s kinda disgusted by how domestic she’s being right now, but that part of her brain is overruled.

( _And, y’know, not having to worry about breakfast is a plus for the rest of her morning plans._ )

They raid the liquor cabinet around noon, dancing around the house in underwear and nothing else, she and Emma both have their hair down and Emma’s glasses are somewhere in the bedroom and Neal keeps stopping for a couple seconds every time he looks at either of them, looks at them like they’re precious and beautiful and _everything_ , the same way they look at him, look at each other, and Lily could get so used to being one point of a triangle made up of this brand of devotion, she could get _so_  used to being essential to this beautiful little microcosm they’ve carved out of the real world for themselves.

She’s already half used to it, and admitting that is the most exhilarating kind of scary.

She grabs a marker from a desk drawer just before they all collapse on the couch, watches her lovers kiss lazily for a minute before she grabs Neal’s wrist. “Need a hand?” he quips from the far side of Emma’s mouth, and Emma snorts until she realizes what Lily means to do, and then her eyes go big with memories.

“This,” Lily starts, taking a deep breath, “Is an us thing. The first us thing. And you’re ours now, so you need to be a part of us things.”

He looks at both of them, they look back solemnly. “Yours?” he repeats, eyebrows raised. It’s not a real question.

“Ours,” Emma confirms, and then takes the marker and draws a star on their boyfriend’s wrist. His eyes light up in recognition as Lily draws a corresponding one on their mutual girlfriend. “Now we match,” Emma murmurs, and then they’re all kissing again.

Somewhere in the middle they make a game of it, tracing constellations in Emma’s freckles, drawing the swirls of galaxies on Neal, peppering Lily’s skin with more stars, new stars, like she’s fallen through a nebula, greedy girl couldn’t stop herself from gathering up the stardust, a poet she loves once said _I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night_  and every fiber of her understands that now, Lily has always loved poetry and sometimes these days it’s the only thing that sums up what’s going on in her head, the dizzy swirl of love and trust and _home_  that’s settling into her bones. _Her people_. They gasp out proclamations of love into her mouth and against her skin and she feels full of starlight, of possibilities, of hope.

“Ours,” she repeats, sleepily, when they’ve exhausted themselves and ended up curled together on the living room floor because they’re too lazy to get up. _Ours_  like it’s a prayer, it’s music to her ears.

“Yours,” Neal confirms, with passion and desperation and the relief that follows years of loneliness in his voice. Emma, in the middle this time, manages to snuggle up closer to both of them at once. It’s more a mark of how happy she is than any words could be, they both know their mutual lover doesn’t trust easy, doesn’t show affection easy except in the darkness when the monsters can't see that her walls are down.

Lily smiles to herself and reaches over Emma to trace a galaxy she drew earlier. “Hey, be our boyfriend?”

“I thought I already was,” he mumbles, sounding as tired as Emma looks and Lily feels. Tired in the best way, though.

“Not officially. I want to make sure we all know what’s up,” Lily murmurs back, and he shoots her a goofy smile.

“Then yes, Lilith Page, I will totally be your boyfriend. And Emma’s, if she’ll have me.” The girl in question makes a sleepy sound that’s too close to _Yes, dumbass_  to be a coincidence, and they share another laugh that the real world can’t touch.

Loved the stars too fondly, damn right.


End file.
